UPCOMING EVENTS

The Pirate Bay, the most popular file-sharing website on the planet, has updated its main page once again, this time setting a countdown date for February 1. The group has also added firework animations and a “WeAreTPB” (We are The Pirate Bay) banner, but nothing else appears to be new.

The site, which went down on December 9 after police raided its data center in Sweden, doesn’t feature an official announcement – the only official statement from the group came on December 15, when a member said no decision had been made whether the site would return. On December 22, however, the official thepiratebay.se domain suddenly came back online, albeit only as a single page featuring a flip-clock counter that was counting the length of time that the site had been offline.

Today, that counter is now counting down instead of up. It has over 30 days to go, which leads us neatly to February 1 in almost all parts of the world.

We doubt we’ll have to wait that long to get more hints as to what is coming. As we noted in our recap story, the domain has been updated many times since it came back to life.

In addition to the counter, there is a BitTorrent Sync key that gave access to various The Pirate Bay files, as well as a magnet link for a 1080p copy of Sony Pictures’ The Interview. A cartoon image of Kim Jong-un was overlaid on the waving pirate flag for a few days.

The flag, which is now overlaid with fireworks and the “WeAreTPB” text, is hosted on The Open Bay, an isoHunt creation which lets anyone with “minimal knowledge of how the Internet and websites work” deploy their own version of The Pirate Bay online. That site has already birthed hundreds of such “copies.”

What exactly The Pirate Bay has planned isn’t clear, though we wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with, or similar to, The Open Bay. Only time will tell.